NASA blows budgets, schedules so much that credibility suffers

Year after year, NASA's biggest projects are way over budget and way behind schedule.

They're not a little over budget or slightly behind schedule either. When NASA blows a budget or deadline, the space agency does it with gusto.

Every year, internal and external auditors issue reports showing that almost every single NASA mission -- human or robotic -- will cost more money and take more time to finish than government managers and private contractors originally estimated.

Every year, the reasons cited in those audits are the same: overly ambitious project specifications and overly optimistic cost assumptions. Additional reasons are cited. The audit reports are sadly predictable in listing the problems, the causes and that NASA and its contractors are "making progress" on reform.

Consider some of the taxpayer-frustrating figures from the latest audit of NASA's big programs:

The Mars Science Laboratory, already over budget and at least two years behind its launch schedule, is going to cost taxpayers $660 million more than NASA said in 2007. What's more, that 2007 budget figure was a readjustment based on the realization that the project already was way over budget.

Glory, a spacecraft designed to study how the sun and particles in our atmosphere alter Earth's climate, is getting more expensive too: up from $169 million to $259 million just in the last two years.
A global weather satellite called NPP is $132 million more expensive than its revised 2007 budget, which was adjusted because the project already was over budget.

The launch date then was in 2008. Now, it's set for 2011 though project managers told the auditors it was likely to slip again.

NASA's bid to turn a jumbo jet into a flying telescope was supposed to cost $251 million when it started in 1997. Now, the cost is more than $1 billion. The first flights, which were supposed to happen about five years ago, are currently set for as early as this year but more likely 2013 or 2014.

The project has been plagued by engineering problems, including difficulty cutting a gigantic window in the side of the aircraft for the observatory to see through, and the loss of Germany as a partner.

Many of the projects, while costing more, also are seeing features and capabilities reduced, too. So, the agency ends up with more expensive, but less capable spacecraft flying years later than planned.

"NASA noted that its projects are high-risk and one-of-a-kind development efforts that do not lend themselves to all the practices of a 'business case' approach that we outlined," the Government Accountability Office said in its report to Congress on the projects.

However, the audit report went on to note the uniqueness of NASA's projects was not wholly responsible. Nor is it an acceptable excuse for repeatedly, year after year, missing cost and schedule marks by so much.

This is not to say the American space program -- incorporating NASA and its team of core contractors -- are a league of bumblers incapable of delivering a basic project on time and within budget. Space is hard. A great nation should invest money in space exploration. Predicting costs and launch dates over development periods lasting five, 10 or even 15 years is a challenge. That's all true.

But the questions linger: Almost every project? For the same reasons? Year after year? That's progress?

Until questions like that are answered, NASA will continue to face a credibility problem with Congress and the taxpayers when it comes to its inability to deliver on the commitments made in its budgets.